Strategic Asia 2008-09: Challenges and Choices

Asia’s Water Security Crisis:China, India, and the United States

executive summary This chapter evaluates the water resource challenges confronting the developing countries of Asia and their implications for broader regional and global security concerns. main argument: Water security throughout the developing countries of Asia is poor and under growing threat. This insecurity poses risks for public health, political stability, and continued economic growth both within Asia and abroad. • Within many Asian states, conflicts are flaring over competing demands for water and growing public health challenges. Weak state capacity compounds the challenge of addressing gaps in water security. • Asia must also contend with the potentially devastating impacts of global climate change: rising sea levels, increasing pestilence and disease, extreme flooding and droughts, and declining agricultural productivity. • India and China, the two most populous developing Asian economies, sit at the headwaters of several of Asia’s most important rivers. As these states increasingly tap into shared water resources, they are shaping the water security opportunities and challenges for the rest of the region. policy implications: The U.S. can assist Asia in addressing serious water security issues. • Of particular use would be for the U.S. to extend integrated policy and technology assistance on water resource management to Asia’s water resource, environment, and public health agencies. • Washington could extend its mediation efforts in the Mekong Basin to other critical emerging conflicts to enhance the leverage of weaker states. • Of benefit would be U.S. leadership on global climate change to help mitigate or counteract the anticipated significant downsides of climate change for Asia’s water resources. Water Security Asia’s Water Security Crisis: China, India, and the United States Elizabeth Economy Water security has become one of the great global challenges of the 21st century. In just over half a century, world population has soared from 2.5 billionin1950to6.5billionin2007.Thispopulationincreasehascontributed to a doubling of irrigated areas and a tripling of water withdrawals across the globe.1 As a result, tensions within and among countries over access to water are rising, public health is increasingly endangered, and long-term global economic growth is more and more at risk. Conceptions of what constitutes water security differ, but at the most basic level water security connotes access to safe drinking-water and sanitation.2 Water security can be threatened both by economic water scarcity and by physical water scarcity—conditions that the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) suggests affect one-third of the world population.3 As the IWMI has described, economic water scarcity occurs when “water resources are abundant relative to water use, with less than 25% of water from rivers withdrawn for human purposes, but malnutrition 1 International Water Management Institute, Water for Food, Water for Life: A Comprehensive Assessment of Water Management in Agriculture (London: Earthscan, 2007). 2 Some analysts define water security as the equitable access to safe drinking water and sanitation, while others consider water security to be sustainable access to adequate quantities of water, of acceptable quality for human and environmental uses, on a watershed basis. 3 “Map Details Global Water Stress,” BBC News, August 21, 2006, http://www.news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ science/nature/5269296.stm. Elizabeth Economy is C.V. Starr Senior Fellow and Director of Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. She can be reached at . The author wishes to thank Jaeah Lee, research associate at the Council on Foreign Relations, for her excellent research assistance in the preparation of this chapter. 366 • Strategic Asia 2008–09 exists…human and financial capacity are limiting.”4 Physical water scarcity, in contrast, emerges when “more than 75% of river flows are allocated to agriculture, industries or domestic purposes.”5 Water, of course, is part of the essence of life. Malin Falkenmark of the Stockholm International Water Institute offers an elegant understanding of why water security matters: [Water] acts as a silent messenger and a unique solvent continuously on the move through the landscape, in incessant contact with ecosystems; it is a key component of land productivity and plant production; it has many different functions for societal human life: for health; for food production; for industrial production and the generation of income; for energy production; for navigation; and so on.6 Many other scholars and policy analysts, including Thomas HomerDixon , Robert Kaplan, and Shlomi Dinar, consider water scarcity to be a potentially key contributing factor to intrastate and interstate political or even armed conflict. As Dinar has noted, “environmental change...